2nd IEEE Workshop on Optical Wireless Communications
IEEE 802.15.7 Physical Layer Summary
Richard D. Roberts, Sridhar Rajagopal, and Sang-Kyu Lim
Intel Corporation, Samsung Electronics and ETRI
richard.d.roberts@intel.com, srajagop@sta.samsung.com, sklim@etri.re.kr
Abstract This paper summarizes the PHY layer of the IEEE
802.15.7 Standard for Short-Range Wireless Optical
Communication using Visible Light, and highlights issues that
drove the technical content. The discussion explains the
modulation formats developed in the standard and then shows
how these formats are modified to maintain LED light visibility
and support dimming while preventing perceivable flicker.
Index Terms visible light communications, VLC, dimming,
flicker, IEEE 802.15.7, optical communications
I. INTRODUCTION1
V ISIBLE light communication (VLC) transmits data via
intensity modulating light emitting diodes (LEDs) faster
than the persistence of the human eye. VLC merges lighting
and data communications in applications such as modulated
area lighting, signboards, streetlights, vehicle safety lighting,
and traffic signals. Optical data communication is not new but
there has been a renewed interest due to the available
modulation bandwidth of LED lights. The use of LED
transmitters, along with photodiode receivers, has opened up
the potential for low power consumption communications with
immunity to electromagnetic interference and non-interference
with Radio Frequency (RF) systems [3-11].
II. TECHNICAL ISSUES UNIQUE TO VLC
VLC can be contrasted to traditional wireless
communications inasmuch as a human can see the light wave
carrier (i.e. visible light) which means the modulation process
must not introduce any noticeable flicker, either during the data
frame or between data frames. Also, VLC has to support
communications while a user arbitrarily dims the light source.
All this is accommodated in the IEEE 802.15.7 standard [1] as
discussed and explained in this paper.
A. Flicker Issues
Flicker is defined as the fluctuation of light intensity due to
modulation of the light source and needs to be mitigated. The
maximum flicker time period (MFTP) is defined as the
maximum time period over which the light intensity can be
changing without the resulting flicker being perceivable by the
human eye [3]. To avoid flicker, the brightness changes over
periods longer than MFTP must be avoided. Flicker
classification in VLC and the technologies for flicker
mitigation are summarized in Section V.
978-1-4673-0040-7/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE 772
B. Dimming Issues
Light infrastructures in many residential, office and
industrial areas have dimming circuits associated with the
lighting. Lighting controls are used to provide personal
comfort, extend lifetime of the lighting and save energy.
Dimming support is also one of the requirements being
proposed for Energy Star certification by the U.S. Department
of Energy (DoE) [2]; hence, VLC needs to incorporate support
for dimming as discussed in section IV. The dimming needs to
be high resolution because the human eye has a non-linear
response to the dimming level (the dimming range typically
needs to vary between 0.1 100%). Visibility support is also
needed to maintain the illumination function when not sending
data.
III. MODULATION METHODS
The IEEE 802.15.7 standard [1] offers three physical layer
(PHY) types roughly grouped by data rate. PHY I operates
from 11.67 kb/s to 266.6 kb/s, PHY II operates from 1.25 Mb/s
to 96 Mb/s, and PHY III operates from 12 Mb/s to 96 Mb/s and
is dedicated to multiple optical sources using a particular
modulation format called color shift keying (CSK) [12]. The
modulation formats used in PHY I and PHY II devices consist
of on-off keying (OOK) and variable pulse-position modulation
(VPPM). All three PHY modes operate in the presence of
dimming. During dimming OOK maintains a constant range
with reduced bit rate, while VPPM holds the bit rate constant
and reduces the range. Also, the three modulation waveforms
have been crafted to achieve coexistence between each PHY
type.
Each PHY mode contains mechanism for modulating the
light source, coding to achieve DC balance to avoid data
induced flicker and forward error correction. Each mode has an
associated optical clock rate which is divided down by the
various coding schemes to obtain the final resulting data rates
as shown in Tables I, II and III.
The data rates supported in the various PHYs were designed
to be fairly conservative in order to support a wide range of
optical sources and detectors. The IEEE 802.15.7 standard has
been designed to work under optical noise sources such as
natural daylight and artificial illumination from fluorescent and
incandescent lamps. PHY I has been optimized for low rate,
long distance, outdoor applications such as vehicles and traffic
lights. PHY II has been optimized for high rate, indoor
infrastructure and point-to-point applications. PHY III has been
optimized for indoor point-to-point applications, which can TABLE II
PHY II OPERATING MODES
support multiple LEDs to produce white light.
FEC schemes were proposed in the standard to work Modulation RLL code
Optical
FEC Data rate
reasonably well in the presence of hard decisions that would be clock rate
generated by the clock and data recovery circuits (CDR). Also, RS(64,32) 1.25 Mb/s
since outdoor applications used low data rates and short packets, 3.75 MHz
RS(160,128) 2 Mb/s
the channel codes were designed to support long and short
packets. FEC codes were also designed to interface well with VPPM 4B6B RS(64,32) 2.5 Mb/s
Manchester, 4B6B and 8B10B line codes. RS and CC codes 7.5 MHz RS(160,128) 4 Mb/s
were used for FEC instead of advanced coding schemes such as None 5 Mb/s
Low Density Parity Check (LPDC) for short packet support,
hard decision decoding support, low complexity and ability to RS(64,32) 6 Mb/s
15 MHz
interface well with RLL line codes. For outdoor applications, RS(160,128) 9.6 Mb/s
stronger codes using concatenated Reed-Solomon (RS) and RS(64,32) 12 Mb/s
convolutional codes (CC) were developed to combat larger 30 MHz
RS(160,128) 19.2 Mb/s
interference levels with daylight and longer distance. For
indoor applications, where the coding requirements were less OOK 8B10B RS(64,32) 24 Mb/s
60 MHz
stringent, RS codes are used for FEC, which were better suited RS(160,128) 38.4 Mb/s
for high rate implementations. RS codes also worked well in RS(64,32) 48 Mb/s
conjunction with the run length limited (RLL) line codes,
120 MHz RS(160,128) 76.8 Mb/s
where the errors detected from the line codes at the receiver
could be marked as erasures to the RS decoder, providing None 96 Mb/s
performance improvements of around 1 dB. For PHY I, an
interleaver was designed between the RS code and the CC code TABLE III
to provide additional 1 dB of performance improvement. PHY III OPERATING MODES
The optical clock rates chosen for PHY I, II and III were also Modulation Optical clock rate FEC Data rate
selected after careful choice of the applications for the PHY
4-CSK RS(64,32) 12 Mb/s
types. The optical clock rate for PHY I was chosen to be  400 12 MHz
KHz to account for the fact that LEDs used in applications such 8-CSK RS(64,32) 18 Mb/s

as traffic lights require high currents to drive the LEDs and 4-CSK RS(64,32) 24 Mb/s
hence, can switch only slowly. For PHY II, the optical clock 8-CSK RS(64,32) 36 Mb/s
rate was chosen to be  120 MHz as fast LEDs can be 16-CSK 24 MHz RS(64,32) 48 Mb/s
incorporated into mobile and portable devices for P2P 8-CSK none 72 Mb/s
communication. The optical clock rate was chosen to be  24 16-CSK none 96 Mb/s
MHz for infrastructure LEDs used in PHY III.

TABLE I
PHY I OPERATING MODES A. OOK Modulation and Dimming Method
FEC The OOK mode transmitter block diagram is shown below.
Optical
Modulation RLL code clock Outer Inner Data rate
rate code code
(RS) (CC)
Fig. 1. OOK transmitter block diagram
(15,7) 1/4 11.67 kb/s
(15,11) 1/3 24.44 kb/s The frame formatted bits enter two stages of optional
Man- 200 (15,11) 2/3 48.89 kb/s forward error correction before being Manchester run length
OOK
chester kHz (15,11) None 73.3 kb/s limited coded. The message payloads for Type I PHY devices
are anticipated to be relatively short; hence, concatenated FEC
none None 100 kb/s was chosen due to its efficiency. The Manchester encoding
embeds the clock into the data by representing a logic zero by
(15,2) None 35.56 kb/s an OOK symbol 01 and a logic one by an OOK symbol 10,
400 (15,4) None 71.11 kb/s which is a DC balanced code. This is important since it allows
VPPM 4B6B a DC component to be added to the waveform for illumination.
kHz (15,7) None 124.4 kb/s
The OOK waveform is actually a misnomer inasmuch as the
none None 266.6 kb/s
off part of OOK doesnt necessarily mean the light is
completely turned off; but rather, the intensity of the light may
simply be reduced.
During dimming, the OOK modulated light intensity must
decrease. This can be achieved by either redefining the on

773
and off levels of the OOK symbol to have a lower intensity, TABLE IV
MAPPING INPUT 4B TO OUTPUT 6B
or the levels can remain the same and the average duty cycle of
the waveform can be changed by the insertion of 4B (input) 6B (output) Hex
compensation time into the modulation waveform.
0000 001110 0

Data Transmission Time Compensation Time Data Transmission Time Compensation Time 0001 001101 1

0010 010011 2
Fig. 2. Dimming via the insertion of compensation time
0011 010110 3
If the compensation time is realized by turning off or on the 0100 010101 4
light source for the duration then the net effect is a change in the
perceived light intensity. 0101 100011 5
The structure for the OOK dimming frame is as shown in 0110 100110 6
Figure 3. This process breaks the frame into sub-frames and
0111 100101 7
each sub-frame can be preceded by a resync field that aids in
readjusting the data clock after the compensation time. The data 1000 011001 8
frame is fragmented into sub-frames of the appropriate length 1001 011010 9
after the FCS has been calculated and the FEC has been
1010 011100 A
applied.
1011 110001 B

1100 110010 C

1101 101001 D

1110 101010 E

Fig. 3. OOK dimming structure
B. VPPM modulation and dimming method
Variable pulse position modulation makes use of the
characteristics of pulse position modulation (PPM) for
non-flicker and pulse-width modulation (PWM) for dimming
control, as shown in Fig. 4. VPPM symbols one and zero are
distinguished by the pulse position within a unit time period
and have the same "ON" time pulse-width within their
respective unit time period. VPPM changes the "ON" time
pulse-width in response to the requested dimming level.
Fig. 4. Basic concept of Variable PPM
The VPPM mode transmitter block diagram is shown in
Fig.5.
1111 101100 F
C. CSK modulation and dimming method
Color shift keying (CSK) supports VLC using multi-color
light sources and color filtered photo-detectors. CSK has the
following characteristics.
1) Connectivity is guaranteed by the color coordinates:
CSK channels are decided by mixed colors that are allocated in
the color coordinates plane; therefore, the connectivity is
guaranteed by the color constellation on the xy color
coordinates.
2) Total power is constant: the total power of all CSK light
sources is constant because the envelope of the sum of all light
signals is constant.
3) Variable bit rate: CSK enables variable bit rate due to
higher order modulation support; that is, it supports multiple
bits per CSK symbol.
CSK dimming employs amplitude dimming and controls the
brightness by changing the current driving the light source.

Fig. 5. VPPM transmitter block diagram

The frame formatted bits enter an optional forward error

correction stage before being 4B6B run length limited coded.
The 4B6B coding takes an arbitrarily DC unbalanced 4 bit code
and changes it into a DC balanced 6 bit code as shown in Table Fig. 6. International Commission on Illumination CIE 1931
IV. xy color coordinates

774

Fig. 7. Constellation design rule for 4-CSK
Figure 8 shows the CSK system configuration for PHY III
with three different wavelength sources i, j and k, which are
selected from the wavelength band plan mentioned in Table V.
After scrambling and channel coding, data is transformed into
x-y values, according to the mapping rule on the x-y color
coordinates by the color coding block. The scrambler is
necessary to create pseudo-random data and prevent data
pattern dependent color shifts. The data parts of the frame are
subject to the FEC block for error protection.
sent or not. When data is not being sent then an idle pattern,
with the proper duty, is sent by the light source to maintain
visibility. The idle pattern has the same duty cycle that is used
during the active data communication so that there is no flicker
seen during idle periods.
B. Hybrid idle pattern and compensation time dimming
The idle pattern is inserted between the data frames for light
dimming, as shown in Figure 9. The idle pattern can either be
sent in-band or out-of-band as defined by the modulation
domain spectrum shown in Figure 10 (i.e. the spectrum
observed at the output of the photo-detector). An in-band idle
pattern does not require any change in the clock and can be
detected by the receiver. An out-of-band idle pattern is
typically sent at a much lower optical clock rate (including the
option of maintaining visibility via a DC bias only) and is not
detected by the receiver (i.e. is not in the receiver modulation
domain bandpass).
Compensation time is defined as the idle time inserted into
the data frame with the appropriate duty cycle to meet dimming
requirements.

Fig. 9. Idle pattern and compensation time dimming

Fig. 8. CSK system diagram for PHY III

TABLE V Fig. 10. Modulation domain spectrum for visible light

VISIBLE LIGHT WAVELENGTH BAND PLAN
communication
Wavelength Spectral width Code
(nm) (nm) C. Visibility patterns
380 478 98 000 Visibility patterns are in-band idle patterns that are used in
478 540 62 001 the payload of a visibility frame. The visibility patterns are used
540 588 48 010 for supporting features such as flicker mitigation, continuous
visibility, device discovery, and color stabilization. The
588 633 45 011
visibility patterns are not encoded at the PHY layer and do not
633 679 46 100 have a frame check sequence (FCS) associated with them.
679 726 47 101 A set of eleven low resolution patterns with 10% step size are
726 780 54 110 defined in Table VI. In order to generate high resolution
Reserved 111 visibility patterns from 0% to 100% in steps of 0.1%, the low
resolution patterns can be sent in a manner such that when time
IV. DIMMING MECHANISMS averaged the required high resolution dimming is achieved. For
example, given visibility patterns with 10% resolution, a 25%
This section outlines various methods for dimming with
visibility pattern can be attained by alternately sending a 20%
visible light communication.
pattern and a 30% pattern. The standard specifics an algorithm
A. Idle pattern dimming for determining the mix of patterns for receiver synchronization
The dimming level must be maintained whether data is being and meeting the required dimming levels.

775
 TABLE VI - VISIBILITY PATTERNS VI. CONCLUSION

visibility pattern percentage visibility This paper introduced the IEEE 802.15.7 visible light
communication standard PHY modes, the mechanisms to
11111 11111 100% support dimming and the methods used to prevent flicker. The
11110 11111 90% standard allows multiple diverse topologies such as
peer-to-peer and star topologies to support various indoor and
11110 11110 80% outdoor applications with a wide range of data rates from 11.67
11101 11100 70% kb/s to 96 Mb/s and support for dimming.

11001 11100 60% ACKNOWLEDGMENT

10001 11100 50% The authors are grateful to their colleagues at Samsung
Electronics, Intel, ETRI and in IEEE 802.15.7 for discussions
00001 11100 40%
and assistance with this work. ETRI's work was supported by
00001 11000 30% the ICT Standardization program of MKE (The Ministry of
Knowledge Economy) and the IT R&D program of
00001 10000 20%
MKE/KEIT.
00001 00000 10%
REFERENCES
00000 00000 0%
[1] IEEE 802.15.7 WPAN Task Group 7 (TG7) Visible Light
Communication, http://www.ieee802.org/15/pub/TG7.html.
V. FLICKER MITIGATION [2] Energy Star Requirements. http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/
prod_development/revisions/downloads/lighting/ESIntegralLampsCriter
The flicker in visible light communications is classified into ia_Draft1.pdf.
two categories according to its generation mechanism: [3] S. M. Berman, D. S. Greenhouse, I. L. Bailey, R. Clear, and T. W. Raasch,
Human electroretinogram responses to video displays, fluorescent
intra-frame flicker and inter-frame flicker. Intra-frame flicker is
lighting and other high frequency sources, Optometry and Vision Science
defined as the perceivable brightness fluctuation within a 68:645-662, 1991
frame. Inter-frame flicker is defined as the perceivable [4] Toshihiko Komine and Masao Nakagawa, Fundamental Analysis for
brightness fluctuation between adjacent frame transmissions. Visible-Light Communication System using LED Lights, IEEE Trans.
Consumer Electronics, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 100-107, Feb. 2004.
This section outlines the methods used for flicker mitigation in [5] Ying Li and Sridhar Rajagopal, Fast and Energy-Efficient Link Recovery
VLC. in Visible Light Communications, IEEE CCNC 2010 proceedings, pp.
1081-1082, 2010.
A. Intra-frame flicker mitigation [6] Hoa Le Minh, Dominic OBrien, Grahame Faulkner, Lubin Zeng,
Kyungwoo Lee, Daekwang Jung, YunJe Oh, and Eun Tae Won, 100-Mb/s
Intra-frame flicker in OOK is avoided by the use of the NRZ Visible Light Communications Using a Postequalized White LED,
dimmed OOK mode and Manchester RLL coding. VPPM IEEE Trans. Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 21, no. 15, pp. 1063-1065, Aug.
inherently does not cause any inter-frame flicker and also uses a 2009.
[7] H.Q. Nguyen, J.-H. Choi, M. Kang, Z. Ghassemlool, D. H. Kim, S.-K.
RLL code. Inter-frame flicker is avoided in CSK by ensuring Lim, T.-G. Kang, and C. G. Lee, A MATLAB-based simulation program
constant average power across multiple light sources along for indoor visible light communication system, CSNDSP 2010
with scrambling and the high optical clock rates (MHz) at proceedings, pp. 537-541, 2010.
which this modulation is used. [8] Jelena Vucic, Christoph Kottke, Stefan Nerreter, Klaus-Dieter Langer,
and Joachim W. Walewski, 513 Mbit/s Visible Light Communications
B. Inter-frame flicker mitigation Link Based on DMT-Modulation of a White LED, Journal of Lightwave
Tech., vol. 28, no. 24, pp. 3512-3518, Dec. 2010.
Inter-frame flicker mitigation arises due to intensity variation [9] Jae Kyun Kwon, Inverse Source Coding for Dimming in Visible Light
between the data transmission time and the idle time. When the Communications Using NRZ-OOK on Reliable Links, IEEE Trans.
Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 22, no. 19, pp. 1455-1457, Oct. 2010.
dimmer setting is changed, the device adjusts the data [10] Jonathan J. D. McKendry, Richard P. Green, A. E. Kelly, Zheng Gong,
transmission and idle time accordingly. A summary of the Benoit Guilhabert, David Massoubre, Erdan Gu, and Martin D. Dawson,
different mitigation techniques for inter-frame and intra-frame High-Speed Visible Light Communications Using Individual Pixels in a
Micro Light-Emitting Diode Array, IEEE Trans. Photon. Technol. Lett.,
flicker is provided in Table VII. vol. 22, no. 18, pp. 1346-1348, Sep. 2010.
[11] Kaiyun Cui; Gang Chen; Zhengyuan Xu; Roberts, R.D., Line-of-sight
TABLE VII - FLICKER MITIGATION SCHEMES visible light communication system design and demonstration,
Idle or RX Communication Systems Networks and Digital Signal Processing
Flicker Data transmission periods (CSNDSP), 2010 7th International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.621-625,
mitigation (Intra-frame flicker) (Inter-frame 21-23 July 2010.
flicker) [12] Atsuya Yokoi, Color Multiplex Coding for VLC, IEEE802.15.VLC Study
OOK Dimmed OOK mode,
Group,
modulation RLL code https://mentor.ieee.org/802.15/dcn/08/15-08-0743-01-0vlc-color-multipl
ex-coding-for-vlc.pdf, November 2008,
VPPM VPPM guarantees no intra-frame flicker, Idle/visibility
modulation RLL code patterns
Constant average power across multiple
CSK
light sources, scrambler, high optical clock
modulation
rates (MHz)

776